Brazos Bookstore
Join us in-person on the fourth Thursday of the month for our Voices of Asia Book Club, hosted by Interim General Manager Keerthi. We will explore the authors and literature of Asia as we did into this rich and important literary culture. Click here to see our Voices of Asia main page. Use Coupon Code BOOKCLUB to get the 15% book club discount!
Brazos Bookstore buyer extraordinaire Keaton leads a freestyle conversation about a wide variety of fiction. No need to worry if you haven’t read this month’s book - all are welcome! But be prepared for spoilers...This month we are reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones.Click here to view our main Brazos Book Club page.Use Coupon Code BOOKCLUB to get the 15% book club discount!
Brazos welcomes Babette Fraser Hale on Tuesday, October 20 at 6:30 p.m. to discuss her newest book, Narcissi. Cole Burnett, a Texas novelist, is the kind of man whose need for freedom should send lovers running in the opposite direction. But he has a lanky charisma and the gift of listening, rare enough at any time.The women he encounters in Narcissi, a novel-in-stories, find his attention compelling, and they all get hurt, or cause hurt. But hurt is never the whole story.Each woman brings her own complicated life into her time with Cole, conflicts with husbands, traumas survived, needs postponed, children. And children grow up with questions.Burnett understands that loneliness compels him toward the women he meets--whether in a tavern, like Amelia; or a street dance, like Stephanie; or a hotel event, like Lorna. And others he connects with while working, like Dolly, Elsa, Trish and Gladys.None of them quite reaches where the loneliness resides, where whatever's missing pushes him to keep moving, to write more, to find a purpose for his future. Later, after the death threat, traveling becomes a way to stay alive. Babette Fraser Hale is the author of A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers, 2022 winner of the debut fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters and This Familiar Heart: An Improbable Love Story. Her fiction has received notice from Best American Short Stories, 2015 and the Meyerson Award from Southwest Review. In addition to writing fiction, Babette has been a magazine feature writer,columnist, contributing editor, book editor, publisher and part owner of a bookstore. In 2025 she became a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.
Join us every Saturday morning for a special story time, perfect for ages 2-5, but all ages are welcome!
Poetry Open Mic Night returns to Brazos every 3rd Friday at 6:30 pm presented by our partners at Houston Writing Central (formerly WriteSpace) and hosted by the fantastic Caelan Roche! Some weeks will have featured readers in addition to our wonderful open mic participantsSign-ups for readers will be taken at the door starting at 6pm and drawn from a hat starting at 6:15pm. The rules are simple, 5 minutes or 3 pieces, whichever comes first! If there is spare time towards the in we happily invite poets with more material to try out to come back up!The reading is free and open to all: young, old, first timers, veterans, and you! We can’t wait to hear you.
Brazos welcomes Sally Hayden in-store on Thursday, October 15 at 6:30 p.m. Sally will be in conversation with Dr. Seema Jilani. We live in an era defined by crisis - be it war and displacement, climate collapse, or escalating inequality. The author and international correspondent Sally Hayden has spent her career covering some of the darkest moments of our time. But even in the face of unimaginable adversity, she has witnessed the love and care of everyday people.In her new book, This is Also a Love Story, Hayden poses the question, what if news was recounted through the prism of empathy, courage, hope, and love? Crisscrossing the globe, from Uganda to Lebanon, Rwanda to Iraq, the people she encounters include a couple separated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Japanese man with an ingenious way to help people grieving, and a group of Syrian women searching tirelessly for their missing spouses and children. Through their stories, This Is Also a Love Story dares us to recognize how innate generosity and self-sacrifice can be found in even the most difficult of times, and - as a result - to question what might be needed to create a better world. Sally Hayden is an award-winning author, photographer and journalist, who has reported across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter's Search for Goodness in a Cruel World'is Sally’s second book, published by Scribner in June 2026. Her first book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route - about human rights abuses on Europe's borders - won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing; the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award; the Michel Déon Prize; Il Premio Terzani; and was shortlisted for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, among others. She was named overall 'journalist of the year' at the Irish Journalism Awards in 2023 and 2025, and is currently based in Lebanon.Seema Jilani is a pediatric hospitalist at Texas Children’s Hospital and has worked in war zones for over twenty years, including on refugee rescue boats off the coast of Libya, in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza and the West Bank, and postwar Bosnia. She has worked on medical evacuation flights for critically ill children and also in pediatric palliative care. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, BBC, NPR, PBS, LitHub and The Guardian, among other publications. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Join Dr. Arelia Johnson at Brazos on Wednesday, October 14 at 6:30 pm for a discussion on her book Hijacking Equity & The Fight for Justice. Dr. Arelia R. Johnson has spent her career inside the rooms where "equity" gets decided—in local government, higher education, and boardrooms—and she's noticed something curious: the word is everywhere, yet almost no one agrees on what it actually means. Hijacking Equity & The Fight for Justice is her invitation to figure that out together, in public, out loud, without the defensiveness that usually shuts these conversations down before they start.At the heart of the book is her original theory of Distributive Justice, a framework she positions within sociology, tracing how institutions absorb the language of justice while resisting its practice. Johnson writes from the vantage point of a practitioner who has sat inside the institutions she critiques, translating dense theory into a clear-eyed account of how equity gets hijacked: diluted in policy, performed in training rooms, and abandoned the moment it demands redistribution and representation. Copies of Hijacking Equity & The Fight for Justice will be available for purchase at the event. _______________________________________________________________________________Dr. Arelia R. Johnson is a scholar-practitioner, author, and theorist whose work sits at the intersection of sociology, law, and justice. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Criminology from Howard University, where her dissertation examined how policy shapes the identification of transgender murder victims. She is the architect of Distributive Justice, a theoretical framework she positions as a fourth paradigm within sociology, and the creator of several trademarked frameworks — including Joy Is Strategy™ and Language Matters by Arelia Johnson™ — that translate critical theory into applied practice. Dr. Johnson is the author of Hijacking Equity & The Fight for Justice, and is currently developing a second academic book, Not Wolf Nor Sheep: An Exploration of Race, Language, and Gender Identity. A native of Houston's Sunnyside community, she most recently served as the inaugural Chief Officer of Human and Civil Rights for Harris County. She writes and speaks at the crossroads of scholarship and lived experience, insisting that rigor and joy are not opposites.
October 14, 2026 marks 100 years of Winnie the Pooh we will be celebrating with a Winnie the Pooh scavenger hunt here at Brazos! First three kiddos to solve the hunt will get a mystery squishy prize! No need to win, everyone gets stickers in the end!! In addition to the activity, we will be hosting bee2bee as they sell some honey and share information on all the wonderful things they do!! About bee2bee:Bee2Bee Honey Collective provides beekeeping services and hyperlocal honey throughout Houston. Since 2016, we've installed over 100 beehives in micro-apiaries in Houston yards, on rooftops inside the loop, in suburbs and alongside businesses/non-profits. We also partner with local beekeepers to bring their products to market.Our specialties include small-batch neighborhood honeys, honey infusions and products of the beehive. We enjoy experimenting with new flavors and seeking special honey varietals. Our honeys are always unfiltered and raw.